Fiction review: "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders"

In his collection of stories, "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders," Pakistani American author Daniyal Mueenuddin transports us into the world of the feudal landowning class in late 20th-century Pakistan, and, more intimately, into the lives of the cadre of servants that sustain and are sustained by these sprawling households. Mueenuddin gently exposes us to this richly textured culture while drawing us in with stories about universal human longings for love, status and security.

The stories are linked in that characters appear in multiple tales, all of which relate in some way to the small empire of the wealthy and once-powerful K.K. Harouni.

The stories waltz in and out of Harouni's inner circle. In "Nawabdin Electrician," a tragic story about an elderly man who makes his living cheating the electric company for area farms, Harouni is merely a revered patron. In others, such as the title story, we are in Harouni's private rooms during trysts with his young, social-climbing lover. The stories move up and down the class ladder, illustrating the vast discrepancy between the life of a peasant who carries his disassembled home from farm to farm and the jet-setting upper-echelon of Pakistani society.

All of the stories in "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders" have heart, but the strongest are those that concern the servant class and the hierarchy there within. It is the plight of his female characters that is felt most poignantly; perhaps this is a reflection of the quiet stoicism characteristic of their male counterparts. "Saleema" is a painful story in which a woman struggles to raise her position and find security within the lowly ranks of Harouni's household using the only means available: her sexuality. This seems to be the only power women in the lower classes wield, and while it might afford them security for a time, eventually they are put back in their place, and often quite suddenly.

Other stories move into a different world entirely. "Our Lady of Paris," about an interracial relationship between Harouni's nephew and a Yale student, explores the complexities of familial and cultural expectations against the optimism of young love. With tantalizing effect, like a snippet of overheard gossip, Mueenuddin hints at the fate of these characters in a later story.

"Lily," almost a novella in length and scope, is the masterpiece of the collection, encompassing the disparity between the flashy, Westernized end of the cultural spectrum and the dying ways of life on the farm. Lily is a young, jaded socialite flitting from party to party, enduring a life of less and less meaning. She meets and marries a young Princeton-educated Pakistani and convinces him she wants to move to his father's beloved farm, where the reality of rural life and their differences quickly begin to come between them.

As the title suggests, "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders," is a collection of many angles, or windows, that we, along with Mueenuddin's characters, look out from and into. K.K. Harouni may be the common link, but at the end of the book he remains the least in focus. He is simply what holds it together, the hole at the center around which the spokes -- the servants, the stories and the collection itself -- revolve.